Exhibition: Illustrators Club

Exhibition: IC15 Juried Exhibition of the Illustrators Club of Washington DC, Maryland and Virginia
Edison Place Gallery, 702 8th Street, NW, Washington, DC 20001
May 13 – June 26, 2010
Hours: Tues. – Fri., noon to 4:00 p.m.
Phone: (202) 872-3396

There’s a graphite cross-sectional diagram of an erect penis, studiously delineating fluidic rights of way. There’s a conté tower of cantilevering trailer homes, striking an incongruous pose as Frank Lloyd Wright’s celebrated Fallingwater. There’s a digital riff off Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware, in which our first president navigates his rowboat through ice floes with the help of buckskin-clad Mark Twain, Susan B. Anthony, Albert Einstein, and other luminaries of American scientific and social advancement. Thematically, there’s no getting your bearings here, and that’s what makes it great.

The 15th biennial juried exhibition of works by Washington-area illustrators, staged in Chinatown’s sleek Edison Place Gallery, is the perfect antidote to conventional exhibits that chronicle an artist’s exploration of a single theme — the result of which too often is tedious permutations of the same subject and medium. By contrast, IC15 features 120 works by 47 artists, each of whose submissions was intended for markedly different audiences and commissioned for use in one of eight distinct areas: books; products/packaging; editorial; technical/medical/scientific; advertising; institutional; and sequential/animation. An eighth category was included in the show for works that were uncommissioned, such as those created by an artist for a portfolio.

The works on display are by turns witty, instructive, technical, sparse, lush, and perplexing, but each speaks to the way illustration enhances our lives. If so-called “fine art” is self-initiated and exclusive to an artist’s worldview, and cartoons are stand-alone commentaries on society, then illustration is auxiliary art, helping us absorb information as we read, shop, work, travel — in virtually every quotidian context.

A stroll through this exhibit shows you how illustration piques our interest in such things as:

• entertainment (check out Tim Cook’s kooky concert posters for the TeenTones and Robert Meganck’s negative space-emphasizing playbills for the Barksdale Theater)
• libation (Michael Glenwood’s label for 3 Monkeys Cabernet features three macaques swinging across a yellow phosphorous sky, impishly neglecting to cover eyes and ears and mouth)
• history (artist Rob Wood created the Leutze homage for the winter 2010 issue of American Heritage, and you’ll also see his watercolors referencing Palaeologus, a Byzantine Greek noble family, and Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and Beatrice of Burgundy, commissioned for a publication on the history of Christianity)
• sport (you’ll see tee-shirts created by William L. Brown for annual Dagorhir Battle Games, in which medieval enthusiasts battle one another with foam swords, flails, spears, bows, arrows, javelins, and axes).

Given illustration’s role in elucidating and decorating text, IC15 has a fatal flaw: the lack of any information on where or how each entry initially appeared. I gleaned what I could at the May 13 opening reception, where I pounced on several artists and requested explanations of their entries. But for the next month, visitors will be left to ponder what most of the work, stripped of its context, means (a few pieces, such as Phyllis Saroff’s poster for the 2009 Oyster Festival and Shucking Contest, are self-explanatory).

The lack of reference will assuredly lead to misconceptions. During opening night, two men could be observed chortling at what they called John Yanson’s “white trash Fallingwater,” unaware that Yanson conceived the drawing, an uncommissioned piece, out of a profound sympathy for the recession-checked lives of his countrymen.

“For years I had taken pictures of old trailers and campers during my vacations in Maine and out west,” Yanson told me, saying he was drawn to them “because they’re made of aluminum and are very streamlined and they bespeak the American dream of speed and motion. And yet they’re stationed along the road, so it’s as if the American dream has been interrupted for poor people. I saw in them a contrast between the hope of the American dream and the reality of the American people right now.”

The same thoughtfulness can be felt in Yanson’s “Camilo,” a drawing of a shirtless man scaling a rock wall that Yanson rendered in conté crayon. The drawing captures the late-day raking light diffused across the craggy rocks and sinuous, muscular back of the climber, presenting an almost seamless expanse of lines that prompts one to contemplate the harmony between nature and the human body.

It will also be lost on visitors that the exhibition’s two most mesmerizing works, the uncomissioned “Subway” and “Carousel” by David Labrozzi, are Labrozzi’s attempt to explore “motion on the static picture plane” for his master’s thesis at the Hartford Art School in Connecticut. Labrozzi, who is president of the Illustrators Club, has masterfully captured with acrylic paint the look of time-lapse photography for a public he considers visually “sophisticated” as a result of perpetual stimulation from television, video games, and computers. “We live in an age of motion,” Labrozzi told me. “If art doesn’t respond, will it fall behind?”

Finally, IC15, which for the first time includes works by local art students, prompts us to ask questions about the future of illustration. Much ink has been spilt about the waning vigilance of the Fourth Estate as a result of newspaper consolidations and overreliance on a few wire services. According to Brown, there is some concern among illustrators that publications will move away from commissioned illustration toward stock illustration, or illustrations that were created in the past for a specific use, then archived and made available for resale. But an informal opening night survey of illustrators suggests this is a gainfully employed group. Unlike the fine arts community, which still gravitates to New York, illustrators work where they please thanks to their ability to file work products remotely. (In fact, IC15 was the first Illustrators Club exhibition in which all works were submitted and judged digitally.) Aside from the occasional ennui that comes from working alone in the studio for long stretches, illustrators would appear to have a pretty good gig.

This exhibition was judged by Mary K. Baumann, Will Hopkins, Keith Kasnot, Gregory Manchess, C.F. Payne, Chris Sloan, and Jack Unruh.